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Hedonic damages is a legal term that first emerged in 1985 in the research of Stan V. Smith, who was a PhD student in economics at the University of Chicago. The term refers to damages for loss of enjoyment of life, the intangible value of life, as distinct from the human capital value or lost earnings value.
Hedonic damages was used in a legal case for the first time in 1987 in the case of Sherrod v. Berry, 827 F.2d 195 (7th Cir. 1987). [1] [2] and testified as an expert witness in regards to the amount of the hedonic award, the first such testimony proffered nationwide. [3] It has since been used in additional legal decisions, in law review articles, and in law and economics articles in the United States. See for example Professor Cass Sunstein's University of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 340, July 2007. The concept of hedonic damages has been admitted in testimony in state and federal courts. Research on the implications of hedonic damages theory has been published in various peer-reviewed journal articles. Dr. Smith co-authored the first textbook on hedonic damages in 1990, published by Anderson Publishing, Ohio.
Hedonic damages, the loss of the value of life, are allowed in almost every state in a non-fatal injury case. Based on William Daubert et al. v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. , and other admissibility tests, many but not all jurisdictions allow economic expert witness testimony on hedonic damages. For example, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously approved of such testimony in Banks v. Sunrise Hospital, 120 Nev. 822, 102 P.3d 52 (2004). Similarly, the 4th Appellate District in Ohio allowed such testimony based on Daubert in Lewis v. Alfa Leval, 128 Ohio App.3d.200 (1998). The Court of appeals in the Lewis case held that the trial judge properly ruled that the testimony met the Daubert standards, and that it was within the discretion of the trial court to have admitted hedonic damages testimony. The measurement of hedonic damages is based on some 40 years of extensive, well-accepted, peer-reviewed, economic research on the value of a statistical life (VSL). This measurement is controversial among forensic economists. The Value of Statistical Life literature is accepted by most forensic economists, including those few economists who oppose the admission of hedonic damages testimony. Many courts nationwide have allowed such testimony but judges have significant discretion as to its admissibility. Economists generally agree that the VSL is in the $4 million to $5 million range. This value is an average of many published results based on economic research using the willingness-to-pay model. Hedonic damages are not allowed in death cases in the great majority of the states. Some states do allow recovery in wrongful death cases, including New Hampshire, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, Connecticut, Hawaii, and in Federal Section 1983 civil rights violation actions.
Hedonic damages also can apply in cases that involve no injury. Cases involving inmates wrongfully imprisoned have been won with Hedonic Damages approaches. Such were the plights of two former inmates, William Gregory and David Pope, convicted and later exonerated on rape charges. William Gregory, who served seven years in a Kentucky prison, received a $4.5 million settlement, while David Pope, who served 15 years in Texas, received $385,000. While the inmates were free, according to David Hunt, another inmate later freed after serving 18 years, "we're still living the nightmare every day". Hedonic damages attempt to compensate for that suffering with settlements. [4]
A person injured after falling from a defective chair was able to recover hedonic damages. [5]
Economic testimony regarding hedonic damages has been allowed in over two-thirds of the states and two-thirds of the Federal District courts and has been endorsed in unanimous supreme court decisions in Nevada, New Mexico, and Mississippi and in appellate decisions in Ohio. In some states where trial judges have admitted the economic testimony a trial judge in another court may have not admitted the testimony. The same holds true for Federal Circuit courts. Undeterred by a unanimous Supreme Court decision endorsing hedonic damages testimony by an expert economist, The Mississippi legislature subsequently adopted tort reform that precludes loss of enjoyment of life testimony by economic experts. There is significant scholarship endorsing hedonic damages in personal injury and wrongful death cases. [6] [7] Further, hedonic damages were allowed as an element of recovery in the September 11, 2001 Victim Recovery Fund. [8] Although the category of non-economic damages normally included in hedonic damage testimony was acknowledged when identifying and determining compensation for the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the final determinations were not based on the methods or arguments normally presented by those experts who calculate and testify regarding hedonic damages.
The willingness-to-pay model is based on measuring what people pay for safety that results in small reductions in their risk of death. For example, if average people are willing to pay $25 for a carbon monoxide detector that stands a one in two hundred thousand chance of saving their life, the model would imply that such purchasers value their life at $5 million ($25 times 200,000). Economists generally use circumstances involving small risk reductions, recognizing that measuring willingness-to-pay using larger risks will significantly increase the value of a statistical life. [9]
An expert witness, particularly in common law countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, is a person whose opinion by virtue of education, training, certification, skills or experience, is accepted by the judge as an expert. The judge may consider the witness's specialized opinion about evidence or about facts before the court within the expert's area of expertise, to be referred to as an "expert opinion". Expert witnesses may also deliver "expert evidence" within the area of their expertise. Their testimony may be rebutted by testimony from other experts or by other evidence or facts.
The value of life is an economic value used to quantify the benefit of avoiding a fatality. It is also referred to as the cost of life, value of preventing a fatality (VPF), implied cost of averting a fatality (ICAF), and value of a statistical life (VSL). In social and political sciences, it is the marginal cost of death prevention in a certain class of circumstances. In many studies the value also includes the quality of life, the expected life time remaining, as well as the earning potential of a given person especially for an after-the-fact payment in a wrongful death claim lawsuit.
Medical malpractice is professional negligence by act or omission by a health care provider in which the treatment provided falls below the accepted standard of practice in the medical community and causes injury or death to the patient, with most cases involving medical error. Claims of medical malpractice, when pursued in US courts, are processed as civil torts. Sometimes an act of medical malpractice will also constitute a criminal act, as in the case of the death of Michael Jackson.
Contingent valuation is a survey-based economic technique for the valuation of non-market resources, such as environmental preservation or the impact of externalities like pollution. While these resources do give people utility, certain aspects of them do not have a market price as they are not directly sold – for example, people receive benefit from a beautiful view of a mountain, but it would be tough to value using price-based models. Contingent valuation surveys are one technique which is used to measure these aspects. Contingent valuation is often referred to as a stated preference model, in contrast to a price-based revealed preference model. Both models are utility-based. Typically the survey asks how much money people would be willing to pay to maintain the existence of an environmental feature, such as biodiversity.
In United States federal law, the Daubert standard is a rule of evidence regarding the admissibility of expert witness testimony. A party may raise a Daubert motion, a special motion in limine raised before or during trial, to exclude the presentation of unqualified evidence to the jury. The Daubert trilogy are the three United States Supreme Court cases that articulated the Daubert standard:
Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993), is a United States Supreme Court case determining the standard for admitting expert testimony in federal courts. In Daubert, the Court held that the enactment of the Federal Rules of Evidence implicitly overturned the Frye standard; the standard that the Court articulated is referred to as the Daubert standard.
Admissible evidence, in a court of law, is any testimonial, documentary, or tangible evidence that may be introduced to a factfinder—usually a judge or jury—to establish or to bolster a point put forth by a party to the proceeding. For evidence to be admissible, it must be relevant and "not excluded by the rules of evidence", which generally means that it must not be unfairly prejudicial, and it must have some indicia of reliability. The general rule in evidence is that all relevant evidence is admissible and all irrelevant evidence is inadmissible, though some countries proscribe the prosecution from exploiting evidence obtained in violation of constitutional law, thereby rendering relevant evidence inadmissible. This rule of evidence is called the exclusionary rule. In the United States, this was effectuated federally in 1914 under the Supreme Court case Weeks v. United States and incorporated against the states in 1961 in the case Mapp v. Ohio. Both of these cases involved law enforcement conducting warrantless searches of the petitioners' homes, with incriminating evidence being described inside them.
Witness impeachment, in the law of evidence of the United States, is the process of calling into question the credibility of an individual testifying in a trial. The Federal Rules of Evidence contain the rules governing impeachment in US federal courts.
Randall Dale Adams was an American man wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death after the 1976 shooting of Dallas police officer Robert W. Wood. His conviction was overturned in 1989.
Peter J. Neufeld is an American attorney, co-founder, with Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, and a founding partner in the civil rights law firm Neufeld Scheck & Brustin. Starting from his earliest years as an attorney representing clients at New York's Legal Aid Society, and teaching trial advocacy at Fordham School of Law from 1988 to 1991, he has focused on civil rights and the intersection of science and criminal justice.
Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999), is a United States Supreme Court case that applied the Daubert standard to expert testimony from non-scientists.
R v Mohan, 1994 CanLII 80, [1994] 2 SCR 9 is a leading Supreme Court of Canada decision on the use of expert witnesses in trial testimony.
Stan V. Smith is an American economist credited with coining the term and creating the arguments behind the hedonic damages theory, which entered mainstream legal economics in the 1985 court case Sherrod v. Berry. He often presents, publishes, and speaks on economics. He is now president of a national litigation support firm, Smith Economics Group, Ltd., and acts as an expert witness in court cases involving economic damages, from commercial to personal injury damages, including cases where it can be argued the quality of someone's life has been diminished or lost. His economic theories on victim restitution in child pornography in one of his cases that reached the Supreme Court resulted in the Amy Vicky Andy Act signed by President Trump in 2018.
Hedonology (Hedonics), is the study of the impact an injury or incident had on a person's lifestyle.
The role of expert witnesses in English law is to give explanations of difficult or technical topics in civil and criminal trials, to assist the fact finding process. The extent to which authorities have been allowed to testify, and on what topics, has been debated, and to this end a variety of criteria have evolved throughout English case law.
Hangarter v. Provident Insurance Company, 373 F.3d 998, , is a landmark decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on the issue of disability bad faith insurance law. Because California’s bad faith insurance law is often referred to in many states as a model nationwide, the 9th Circuit’s decision has a persuasive impact throughout the country.
The California Innocence Project is a non-profit based at California Western School of Law in San Diego, California, United States, which provides pro bono legal services to individuals who maintain their factual innocence of crime(s) for which they have been convicted. It is an independent chapter of the Innocence Project. Its mission is to exonerate wrongly convicted inmates through the use of DNA and other evidences.
Ajaxo Inc. v. E*Trade Financial Corp., 187 Cal.App.4th 1295 (2010), is the second appeal on a dispute dated back to 1999. During the original 2000 case, defendant E*Trade, an online financial services company, was found liable for maliciously and willfully misappropriating trade secrets pertaining to wireless stock trading technology acquired from the plaintiff, Ajaxo. Under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act E*Trade was required under a mutually signed Non-disclosure agreement (NDA) to keep Ajaxo's trade secrets confidential. After a jury trial in 2003, E*Trade was fined $1.3 million to be paid to Ajaxo for the misappropriation and breach of NDA. The court denied Ajaxo's request for additional damages. All parties appealed. In 2005 the California courts of appeal affirmed the original ruling but remanded the case back to the trial court to determine additional damages. A jury verdict in 2008 rejected claims raised and demands for royalty damages from Ajaxo. In trade secret cases it is common for a plaintiff to seek royalty damages when they are unable to show an actual loss or that the defendant received some inequitable benefit from the misappropriation. In this case the court refused to allow evidence of royalty damages, claiming there were no net damages. Ajaxo appealed. In 2010 the California courts of appeal once again remanded the case back to the trial court reasoning that in such cases an exact quantitative measure of wrongful enrichment damages incurred by the plaintiff might not be sufficient to reject the claim of reasonable royalties based damages
Anthony Ray Hinton is an American activist, writer, and author who was wrongly convicted of the 1985 murders of two fast food restaurant managers in Birmingham, Alabama. Hinton was sentenced to death and held on the state's death row for 28 years before his 2015 release.
